If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s the importance of being able to pivot your business to adapt to unexpected change. It’s also reinforced the importance of having an effective Planning and Scheduling system that allows you to communicate with the customer. Pandemic or no pandemic, being able to adapt to change and successfully doing business online in an increasingly digital world will continue to rise in significance. That’s why it’s vital you choose the right system for your collision repair business to help you transform, grow, improve efficiency and increase profit.
Why You Need a Scheduling System
If you’re trying to simplify your work life while continuing to achieve your production targets, you need a Planning and Scheduling system that has been designed for the collision repair industry. Running a production team and growing production output is a major challenge these days thanks to an increase in work provider demands, and many non-productive tasks eating away at your time and profits. If you want your team to be fixing more cars and at a faster pace, you need fast, efficient and effective planning tools.
Choosing the Right Body Shop Scheduling System
Now that you know you need a planning and scheduling system, the next step is knowing which one to use. This is especially important if you’ve previously tried a scheduling system, only to have it fail on you, or not deliver what was promised or expected. Your collision repair shop needs a product that is flexible, dynamic and meets your individual business’ needs.
What You Should be Looking for
What should you be looking for in a planning and scheduling system? The question you need to ask before this is “what do I want my system to do?” What’s important to you in a management tool? What part of your management process is manual, that needs to be automated? Take a look at where your business is performing, and also where it is under-performing, and start from there. Your business needs and where you can improve will be a great indicator of the type of things you should look for a planning and scheduling system. Take stock of how your collision repair business is running over the course of a few months and you should get a pretty clear idea of where you could do better.
Some things you might want to look for include:
· Intelligently designed forms and menus that let you easily navigate your way around
· Automatic notifications for customers and assessors at different stages of production
· Detailed reporting and benchmarks
· Easily measure staff performance
· Multi-lingual capable
· Synchronise with popular quoting software
· Simplified recording of daily attendance to produce pay slips, and simplified recording of chargeable and nonchargeable tasks.
If You Don’t Know What You Want …
At Planning Plus, we specialise in providing solutions to help you manage productive and administrative tasks, allowing you to easily follow the job from cradle to grave. Our software features easy-to-use highly visual production planning tools, and easily shares important production data with your team and customers. Other benefits include the ability to increase individual staff performance, reduce cycle time and eliminate overtime, hit production targets and increase profit.
On average, Planning Plus Software has increased body shop efficiency for our customers by 17 per cent. Planning Plus features include drag and drop planning, time and attendance recording, complete employee management, automated email and SMS notifications, staff performance measuring, detailed reporting, and benchmarks. Software has also been designed to seamlessly integrate with body shop estimating software. Click here to request a free demo today.